Socially antisocial

Desperate to get out of a work-rut yesterday, Chris and I saw Dream Scenario. It’s interesting but messy in a painful way so I can’t recommend it. The main character at first seems like a socially awkward middle-aged professor (ahem) who’s a little too desperate for ego strokes–which he sort of gets when he goes viral in people’s dreams–but under that spotlight he seems more and more sociopathic. The situation is potentially a metaphor for that angry humiliated average white guy type who seems harmless until he storms the capital.

I had already drafted the bulk of this post when I saw it, but it resonates. I’ve been contemplating the hot mess of social media in relation to my introvert-extrovert poet-professor temperament. I love working alone but also love discussion-based teaching. I think it’s the framework of literariness, at least in part. Serious conversations can be wonderful; trying to engage others in small talk makes me anxious that I’m being boring or misstepping somehow. Social media typically feels like small talk, or at least inauthentic.

I’ve long been on FB, Instagram, and Twitter/ X, preferring the latter, where I try to be a writer in conversation with other writers rather than performing some version of my personal self via partial news and mediocre photography. Twitter, hence, was my favorite of the sites. While X occasionally feels like the old days and I’m still more likely to hear about the latest literary controvery there than elsewhere, it’s extra toxic now, throwing up random right-wing posts in my notifications, for instance. Nor does anybody sane want to support Elon Musk’s business ventures. So while I still check it a couple of times a week, I do so very briefly. For a while I tried Mastodon as a replacement, but I was never able to curate a rewarding feed. Now I’m trying to build community on Bluesky and Threads, with a preference for the former, where I seem to have more positive literary interactions. I’m @LesleyMWheeler in most places and would love to friend more of my poetry-blog-reading-and-writing people, so let me know if you need one of the invite codes Bluesky requires of new users.

Why, though, would an introvert be on any of them? I started FB as a way of communicating with distant friends and family when I had the Fulbright in New Zealand, encouraged by the poet Ned Balbo in particular, who swore you could get a lot out of it by engaging for 5-10 minutes a couple of times per week. I’ve disliked many of FB’s algorithm shifts, but I still appreciate some personal and professional news I find there. I started Instagram to follow my college-age daughter, and I can’t even remember when and why I joined Twitter. The general goals are 1) to learn things and 2) to be visible as a participant in the literary world. If I were famous maybe I’d just quit–social media doesn’t contribute much to my happiness–but it just seems impossible to find readers without it. And I have a poetry book, Mycocosmic, scheduled for winter 2025 publication; I’ve just started querying agents about my new novel, Grievous. The last year has been quiet-ish but I will need platforms. Nor would it be worthwhile to just appear sporadically to promote my own projects and hop off again. I see plenty of those feeds, and they’re dull. They certainly don’t create a sense (an illusion, perhaps) of human connection.

Result: I now check in a couple of times a week each with FIVE social media sites, not including blogs and Substacks, which is way too much! Posting anything across all of them is a time-consuming ordeal…yet I’m skeptical of those programs that help people post across multiple sites all at once, for the reasons described above. Plus those programs don’t seem to work right, although if there’s one you like, I’d appreciate recommendations. The platforms are in competition and they don’t WANT to work smoothly together.

In short, my feelings about it all are mixed and incoherent. I suspect myself of depending social media for more for self-promotion than for human contact, which feels icky. Plus I can get as anxious about posting as I do at cocktail parties. Are my observations dull, stripped of any complexity by tight character limits? Am I hurting someone accidentally or revealing my own ignorance? Is posting really a good use of my scarce free time? And lord, do I REALLY have to include a photograph every damn time if I want anyone to read my post?

Insights welcome. I’ll add that I really do enjoy the relatively substantial form of the blog post (I wouldn’t keep it up if I didn’t), as well as writing poems, nonfiction, and fiction. Focused, sustained attention soothes all the jangling nerves I’m otherwise prone to. Even when readerships are small, literary communication DOES feel authentic in that I’m working through problems and situations I care about deeply. I’m so grateful when others do it, too. (This weekend’s reading plunge is into Tananarive Due’s novel The Reformatory, which so far is outstanding.) And I’m stepping up the poetry reading this month, posting on social media about poems and books I like, because that does NOT feel icky.

My own latest poetry publication was this week in Terrain.org: “Forecasts Can be Invocations” (written during the 2020 election season) and “Harrowing” (an early pandemic poem about in-person interaction at our outdoor farmer’s market). Both are from my forthcoming book Mycocosmic which, yeah, I’ll begin promoting all over the place a few months from now. Both poems, in fact, concern versions of the isolation and anxiety social media makes me feel now, although those emotions took very specific shapes in 2020! Perhaps they’re an example of the kind of rarely-viral communication poetry specifically fosters: slow, because the poems are years from their initial drafts; intimate about hope and pain; true to the weirdness of what I notice and ponder, like the etymology of “turnip”; shaped by the pleasure I take in sound patterns and metaphor. What a strange way poetry is of talking with you, like entering each other’s dreams.

*Featured image from Distant Hill Gardens and Nature Trail